Grab a beer with 300 friends

By Simon McCormack

Misti Collinsworth and Cainan Harris met at a toga party in Kansas City, Mo. They reconnected in Albuquerque a few years later. Over drinks at a Downtown bar, they reached a conclusion. "We were like, There's not really a good gay happy hour place," Collinsworth says. "There's not really a whole lot of good gay anything here. We should probably do something about that."

Silver Backlash

Jami Hotsinpiller rang up the Alibi on a Friday afternoon. She nervously asked if I had a minute. She hates having her picture taken or her words printed for the world to see, and she describes herself as "really shy." She assured me she doesn't belong to any political organizations. But Hotsinpiller's got a media beef and is willing to go on the record about it.

On June 22, the City Council passed the extension of our famous Transportation Tax along to the voters for consideration in October; a reasonable and public-minded course of action, unless you count the arbitrary anti-rail preconditions and exclusions offered by a couple of councilors. But with these “amendments” or without, rail transit is in trouble in Albuquerque.

Dateline: The Netherlands—The Dutch national museum admitted last Thursday that one of its prize possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is actually just a hunk of petrified wood. The Rijksmuseum acquired the rock after the death of former Prime Minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it in 1969 from then U.S. Ambassador J. William Middendorf during a European goodwill tour by three Apollo 11 astronauts. Middendorf, who now lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch broadcaster NOS news that he had gotten the rock from the U.S. Department of State, but couldn’t recall the exact details. The fist-size red stone was last exhibited in 2006. At the time, a space expert informed the museum it was unlikely NASA would have given away any moon rocks three months after Apollo returned to Earth. Researchers from Amsterdam’s Free University said they could see at a glance the rock most likely did not originate on the moon. Now, extensive testing reveals it to be a piece of common petrified wood. “It’s a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone,” geologist Frank Beunk concluded in an article published by the museum. Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder said the museum would keep the curiosity anyway, adding, “We can laugh about it.”

Many of us remember the Cold War. The atomic bombs. The testing and fallout. The drills and shelters. The threats and alerts. The worry, the anxiety, the dread, the fear. The vague belief that none of us would survive the annihilation that the inevitable nuclear war would bring. All this was felt as a weight we carried around on our shoulders every day. We didn’t like it but we almost got used to it, like it was normal.